Cycling fans can divide the history of America’s Tour de France into two epochs—the era of LeMond, who won three Tours, and the age of Armstrong, who won seven. Heading into the 2008 Tour, which starts July 5 in Brest, France, a third and equally dramatic American era may be upon us — the age of the Argyle invasion.
Photos by Mark Johnson

In March 2008, Tour de France organizers ASO extended a Tour invite to the upstart US Slipstream-Chipotle team. Calling the Argyle Armada (as the team is known because of its distinctly patterned jerseys) to battle in the world’s most prestigious cycling event is both a confirmation of the four-year-old team’s rise to the top of the cycling firmament and a way for the Tour organizers to show that they see the future in Slipstream-Chipotle’s clean riding policies.

The signature image of the first American Tour de France era is Greg LeMond streaking down the Champs-Élysées during the final time-trial stage of the 1989 Tour. With his then-radical aero bars and wind-slicing teardrop helmet, LeMond was a yellow bullet exploding the tradition-bound ways of European cycling. The Minnesotan’s embrace of wind-tunnel data and American downhill-skiing technology helped him shatter a seemingly insurmountable 58-second deficit to Laurent Fignon in the final stage time trial. While the French star stuck to tradition and bulldozed both wind and his general classification position with his wide-armed cowhorn bars and helmetless, ponytailed head, LeMond sliced through the sultry Paris air at 34.52 miles per hour and took the Tour by eight seconds over a crushed Fignon. LeMond’s New World willingness to choose facts over tradition and empirical data over received wisdom ushered in a ground shift in pro cycling.

Where LeMond left, Lance Armstrong took off. The seven-time Tour winner married LeMond’s openness to new technology with clinically meticulous training and a corporate-style team organization. With Armstrong’s teams—first US Postal then Discovery—Armstrong abandoned the traditional European team structure in which a loose confederation of riders congeals around a handful of team stars and hopefully rallies around whoever happens to be riding best. (Or not, as LeMond discovered when his ostensible support team rider Bernard Hinault turned against him in the 1986 Tour de France). With Armstrong, nothing was left to chance or the vagaries of fitness or team politics. There was one leader, Lance. Like an effective CEO, Armstrong was exhaustively prepared and expected his underlings to be the same. Riders who rose to the system’s excruciating expectations were handsomely rewarded. Those who didn’t found the nearest door. Such a metrics-driven organization was unprecedented in European cycling, but it worked, delivering Armstrong seven Tour wins in as many years.

With the US Slipstream-Chipotle team’s invitation to the 2008 Tour de France, a third US-Tour de France epoch is dawning. This one also promises to use science, technology, and corporate-style behavioral expectations to confront an age-old cycling tradition—doping.

Led by Tour de France veteran and former Armstrong team rider Jonathan Vaughters, Slipstream-Chipotle began as a development squad for young US riders in 2003. Vaughters started the team with $50,000 of his own money with the vision of creating a US team that would someday race in the Tour de France. In 2008 Slipstream-Chipotle stepped up to the top level of international pro cycling when a budget infusion from New York investor Doug Ellis allowed Vaughters to sign star riders like Paris-Roubaix and Tour de France stage winners Magnus Backstedt from Sweden, David Millar from the UK and Utah’s David Zabriskie.

So far, it seems ASO’s bet on the upstart US team will be spot on. Vaughters’ squad has been on the attack since placing fourth in the season-opening Tour of Qatar in January. In February, David Millar took second, Christian Vandevelde third, and the team won the overall team competition at the Amgen Tour of California. In early April, Vandevelde won a stage and took second overall in France’s Circuit de la Sarthe stage race.

The following week, Slipstream-Chipotle’s 24-year old Dutchman Martijn Maaskant shook Euro cycling by taking home both a 12th place at the Tour of Flanders and a fourth at Paris-Roubaix, France’s infamously cobbled “Hell of the North.” Both these wildly prestigious, century-old races are as much a test of rider savvy as fitness. (Maaskant’s average output during the six hour Paris-Roubaix was 272 watts, and his maximum output was a crank-snapping 1292 watts. More importantly, the youngster showed great wisdom in marshalling out his wattage at the exact moments required to stay at the front of the 248-rider field as it thundered though 28 sections and 38 miles of cobbled farm roads not much wider than a golf cart path.) The fact that Slipstream-Chipotle was able to deliver such a tender rider to the front of these 160-mile monuments of European cycling—and the fact that in Roubaix Maaskant rode away from last year’s winner Stuart O’Grady and this year’s Tour of Flanders winner Stijn Devolder—suggests the young American team will be a force in France come July.

In addition to helping the team secure an invite to the Tour de France, such impressive results along with the team’s anti-doping stance has brought on big public attention. Along with loads of press in cycling publications, the team has been covered by the International Herald-Tribune, the LA Times, the New York Times, the Times of London, and even Information Week. In November 2007 Sports Illustrated nominated Vaughters for its prestigious Sportsman of the Year Award because the magazine felt his no-excuses approach to doping problems was a model for all pro sports. And Doug Ellis mentions that while in the past the team’s Web site saw visitations from US fans and “hard core Julian Dean fans from New Zealand,” after the team’s results in Belgium and Roubaix, Slipstreamsports.com is “getting steadier hits from the Low Countries. Old World, old fashioned cycling fans.” The Roubaix and Flanders results “give our team a lot of credibility that the team is for real,” says Ellis.